After the Hasid leaves town, Moshe returns to his theater and talks with Nate, his reliable worker, about the loud “pop” Moshe heard on Chicken Hill. Nate dismisses it as hard times, but their conversation turns to the lack of safe entertainment for Pottstown’s Black residents. Moshe takes the idea home, and Chona encourages him to open the theater to “the colored,” insisting their money spends the same.

Moshe books Chick Webb, and Black patrons enter the All-American Dance Hall cautiously, then erupt into joyous dancing once the music starts. Watching Webb—disabled yet exuberant—Moshe links his own good fortune to “cripples,” including Chona. Soon Moshe begins having recurring dreams about Moses and the number twelve, which he treats as a private sign; he follows the pattern by investing in stocks and booking Black bands regularly, and his profits grow.

The success provokes backlash from rival theater owners and town authorities, who target Moshe with inspections, fines, and complaints, even from his synagogue. Moshe fights back with payoffs, gifts, cleanup efforts led by Nate and Black workers, and a financial deal with his landlord. Isaac arrives from Philadelphia to silence the synagogue’s penalty by shaming the men who objected, and Moshe’s theater business expands until he buys his building, then a second theater, and secures a comfortable life above the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store—though Chona refuses to let him close or demolish it.

As Jews move off Chicken Hill, Moshe repeatedly pushes to relocate downtown, but Chona insists “America is here” and keeps running the store, writing outspoken letters against the Ku Klux Klan and local injustices. Moshe’s fear of omens returns, and an argument over his joking remark about Chick Webb being “expensive, for a cripple” wounds Chona, forcing Moshe to apologize and confront how his ambition clashes with her values of service and community.

In 1936, the twelfth year of their marriage, Chona develops a baffling illness marked by stomach pain and blackouts; doctors across several cities cannot diagnose it. Moshe hires Addie (Nate’s wife) and Addie’s sister Cleota to help keep kosher and run the store, while Chona, increasingly bedridden, continues directing the business and reading. The Black community of Chicken Hill rallies around her with food, remedies, and companionship, remembering her lifelong friendship with Bernice Davis and her refusal to treat neighbors as lesser.

As Chona declines and briefly lands in the hospital, Isaac visits Moshe at the theater after a Louis Jordan engagement and proposes sending Chona to a Jewish home for the sick in Philadelphia. Moshe, furious at Isaac’s cold practicality and the taboo way “their people” speak about illness, threatens him and refuses, insisting Chona will live.